Flash-detection question: older webap in the context of modern browsers

Question

Here is the situation: we used an older version of Flash to create content in an educational web ap.. In that ap, we have a built-in piece of code that serves as a Flash-detect, located right before a user reaches our Flash content. But now, since modern browsers prompt users to ALLOW or BLOCK Flash content only ONCE they actually hit a page that contains Flash content, users are hitting our old Flash-detect code before they Allow Flash and therefore often fail that Flash-detect code and then get stuck just before actually reaching the Flash content, thus just before they would be prompted by their modern browsers tsimply ALLOW Flash and thus to be able to go forward.

So, as a solution, we are wondering about the idea of perhaps placing a new piece of Flash content onto an earlier page (upsteam in the user's sequence of our old Flash-detect code). Our thought is that this newly added Flash animation graphic would trigger modern browsers' own built-in, user-friendly Flash-detect mechanisms right away, which would prompt the user to ALLOW or BLOCK that Flash content right up-front (later, when they reach our own old Flash-detect code they would be allowed to proceed. My question is, does this idea sound reasonable? And if so, does any such kind of small, pre-made Flash animation graphic already exist for such purposes (e.g. maybe a Flash logo spinning or flashing or something like that? It would be logical for it to be of the Adobe Flash's "F" logo, but we could also just as easily use some other simple animation...maybe even a colored square that flashes on and off.) If the user doesn't have Flash installed or allowed yet, we presume that our Flash-based animation graphic look just appear static (e.g. a solid-colored square [no flashing]) or just a graphic placeholder. (Maybe we don't even need it to be an animated graphic for our purposes? Maybe a still image made in Flash would still trigger the same browser prompts for the user to ALLOW or BLOCK Flash? If so, that could be even easier. Thanks for any feedback.

jeromiec83223024 · Answer

If you're looking for an approach to emulate for handling a world where browsers block Flash Player, Farmville 2 has it nicely dialed.

In terms of approach, my observation has been that using actual full-sized object/embed tags and alternate HTML content (I know... so 2001) works the best in terms of getting all of the major browsers to consistently present a usable click-to-play dialog. Other approaches are highly dependent on individual browser behavior and require testing. On the bright side, I think most of this stuff is stable now, so there isn't the kind of churn that I was seeing in browser implementations several months ago. You can probably get it working well and won't have to revisit it much at this point.

So, in short, my recommendation is to jettison your Flash detection via JavaScript altogether since you can't trust it, and go back to an approach of degrading gracefully with alternate HTML content.

Also, I think that Chrome is moving to "always prompt", such that the initial preference won't always stick.

As usual, my general advice is that if you're not already executing against a plan to migrate to a pure HTML5/JavaScript implementation, you should probably start. In the interim, the more simply you can approach embedding Flash in the page, the better the browsers do at providing a reasonable UI.

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